The Music of Cream: 50th anniversary celebration features relatives of original members

DAVID GERAGHTY/CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

Will Johns, nephew of Eric Clapton (left); Malcolm Bruce, son of Jack Bruce, and Kofi Baker, son of Ginger Baker, will play the music of Cream for the group's 50th anniversary tour at Penn's Peak and Keswick Theatre

Will Johns, nephew of Eric Clapton (left); Malcolm Bruce, son of Jack Bruce, and Kofi Baker, son of Ginger Baker, will play the music of Cream for the group's 50th anniversary tour at Penn's Peak and Keswick Theatre (DAVID GERAGHTY/CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

From 1966-69, at the apex of the explosion of the musical creativity of the 1960s, the band Cream brought together three extraordinary musicians: guitarist Eric Clapton, bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker.

In 2 ½ years, the group defined the power trio, producing music that formed the blueprint for hard rock to follow and was itself enduring. Cream was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, and is among Rolling Stone magazine’s Greatest Artists of All Time.

Cream’s third album, 1968’s “Wheels of Fire,” was the world's first platinum-selling double album. Its songs “Strange Brew” and “White Room” are classics, and “Sunshine of Your Love” is among the Rock Hall’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.

Bruce died in 2014. Baker announced in 2016 he had been diagnosed with “serious heart issues” and has not performed in concert since. Clapton has said he will stop touring.

MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES

The British rock group Cream in February 1968, Eric Clapton (left), Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.

The British rock group Cream in February 1968, Eric Clapton (left), Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES)

But the music of Cream lives on, and has found a new vehicle in the progeny of its members.

The Music of Cream, which features Bruce’s son Malcolm, Baker’s son Kofi and Clapton’s nephew Will Johns, is touring to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the iconic group — 2018 is 50 years since the original formation of Cream played its last show. It plays Sunday at Penn’s Peak near Jim Thorpe and Oct. 18 and Keswick Theater in Glenside.

Malcolm Bruce, in a phone call from south of Chicago, where he was rehearsing for the tour, called the group “a kind of a karmic thing. It’s something that’s in our blood. As much as we love our own music, it’s something that we’ve kind of decided, ‘Let’s embrace this. Let’s go out and honor our heritage.’ So we’re here and we’re excited.”

The members of The Music of Cream have worked hard in the music industry for years, Bruce says.

“We’ve all paid our dues. We’ve all been out there on the road and in different bands and doing lots of different things over the years,” he says. “I think if we weren’t good enough, then it would be kind of embarrassing to do this, you know? But I think we’ve all worked very, very hard. And the music industry is a very challenging industry, so, you know, this is an opportunity for us to get exposure in our own right honoring our parents.”

Bruce says the three met as teenagers. “I met Kofi when he was working at a rehearsal studio in London, and the guy who owned the studio called my mum and said, ‘Oh yeah, Malcolm should put together a band with Kofi. We’d all make a ton of money’ and all of this kind of stuff,” he says with a laugh.

Bruce says there have been attempts to put the trio together over the years, but at the end 2016, promoters in New Zealand asked them to do a tour of Australia and New Zealand for the 50th anniversary of the start of Cream, and they agreed.

On that tour, they were joined by guests Glenn Hughes, the English bassist and vocalist who played in Deep Purple (that band that opened for Cream in the final tour of its original run), and guitarist Robben Ford.

“And that was great,” Bruce says. “But at the end, we kind of all looked at each other and said, ‘Cream is trio music, so it doesn’t really make sense to have Glenn Hughes on stage with a tambourine and two guitarists and all this kind of stuff.”

CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

Poster for the Music of Cream 50th anniversary tour.

Poster for the Music of Cream 50th anniversary tour. (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

Bruce says Johns asked Clapton about the project, “and he kind of gave his person, private blessing. You know, Eric’s a very private person so it’s not like Eric’s going to come out and make some big statement about it. But I think there’s a positive energy in that sense.

“And I know my dad would be proud of us going out and doing this. … We didn’t speak about this before [he died], but he wouldn’t have a problem with it. And it’s nice, I think it’s nice for them in one sense to see the music is carried forth by the kids who were growing up around them.”

Bruce says the legendarily ornery Baker is “a different story.”

“I mean Ginger’s Ginger — that’s all I can say,” he says with a hearty laugh. “I’m not sure Ginger would ever say yes. But I did actually do a session with Ginger earlier this year, and he didn’t tell me not to do this band, either.”

Kofi Baker has performed with his father in Europe and the United States over the years, and also even drummed for Jack Bruce. He also played and toured with members of The Scorpions, UFO and others.

Johns is the son of legendary producer Andy Johns, who worked with The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, and also is the nephew of the late Beatles guitarist George Harrison. The younger Johns also performed with Jack Bruce, as well as The Clash’s Joe Strummer and The Stones’ Ronnie Wood, Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman.

Malcolm Bruce toured with his father as a multi-instrumentalist, and also “worked with my dad behind the scenes on his records,” including his elder Bruce’s final album, “Silver Rails,” in 2014.

“I did all the pre-production for that then we went into Abbey Road studios and recorded that,” Bruce says. “Which was a great achievement for him, because his health was really failing at that point, but he stuck it through.

COURTESY OF SRO ARTISTS

The Music of Cream is a multimedia show, featuring songs and reminiscences.

The Music of Cream is a multimedia show, featuring songs and reminiscences. (COURTESY OF SRO ARTISTS)

“Music is what held our relationship together. … I think the main redeeming thing for me and my dad was that shared love of music and love of each other in the music. And we’d improvise together and talk about the music and I’d work for him. So I learned a huge amount by being involved in that process. So I absolutely feel I got my dad’s blessing in that sense.”

After Cream, Clapton and Baker went on to form another supergroup, Blind Faith, which released just one album, and Clapton went on to become one of the most revered blues/rock guitarists of his time. Baker formed a jazz-fusion ensemble called Ginger Baker’s Air Force.

Bruce, who before Cream had played in the legendary seminal blues-rock group John Mayall and the Blues Breakers with Clapton, released more than a dozen solo albums, and explored jazz and classical music.

But Malcolm Bruce says his father found it hard to break past the specter of Cream.

“I think it’s something he struggled against because he wanted to be recognized for everything else that he’d done — all the things in a career that spanned over 50 years compared to a band that he was in for 2 ½ years .”

Bruce recalled an early 1980s show in Germany before perhaps 5,000 people, with his father employing the then-new technology of synthesizers and programming, for which Bruce says he “spent a few weeks with him in the studio.”

“And he’s doing it and he’s on stage and people are shouting, ‘Play Sunshine of Your Love!’ And he’s, like, having an argument with this German guy in the audience because at that point he wanted to do something new.

“So I think it was like a blessing and a curse. He loved the fact that he’s had that level of success, but he sort of was wanting to chase that level of success with his other stuff.”

Compounding their difficulties were the struggles each member of Cream had with things such as drug addiction, Bruce says.

“I don’t really think that Jack, Eric and Ginger set out to be in a band that was that acclaimed worldwide. I think they were just working musicians that had a love of what they did. And suddenly it just blew out of all proportion,” Bruce says.

“So, you know, I think there was a massive learning curve for all of them. And maybe some of the problems they had along the way with addiction and relationships and family and all that stuff was borne out of the fact that they were thrust into this kind of stellar exposure. And they were just working-class kids, you know? They were just kids who wanted to, you know, make music and make a living doing music. And suddenly they were rock stars, you know?”

But he says his father “in the end he came to terms with it, and obviously was very proud of what he had achieved. And it’s incredible if you think about the songs those guys came up with in a two-year period. It’s just unbelievable, really.”

After breaking up, Cream didn’t play together for 25 years before reuniting to perform at its induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and didn’t play a full show until 2005, when the group played four reunion shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall and three at Madison Square Garden.

Bruce says his father had a liver transplant just a year before, during which he nearly died — saved only, the son says, by his refusal to take his father off life support.

“And basically a year to the day after all that went down, he was standing on stage at the Albert Hall,” Bruce says. “And it was incredibly emotional. And he was very nervous about it because he had to some degree, retrain his voice after going through all that terrible illness.

“But that’s a mark to me of his strength of character, that he had this will — a strength of will — to make that happen. The first night at the Albert Hall, when they walked out on the stage, there was a hush — there was kind of a sacred moment — and with all of us, with the band as well as the audience — that it was like, ‘This is an incredible moment. It was a tears-in-your-eyes kind of moment, where all these fans of this moment had waited all this time for it to happen and it had finally happened.

“So yes, I think he was very proud of the fact that had happened and it meant a huge amount to him.”